Memory Theaters in the Renaissance: Giulio Camillo

Camillo's Theater

Perhaps the most famous--and most
bizarre--memory theater is that of Giulio Camillo Delminio
(1480-1544). Camillo was an italian scholar, renowned, it
appears, for his speech impediment, his corpulence, his
bad Latin, but most of all, his fantastic wooden memory
theater.

It is hard to know exactly, from the
sources available, what purpose Camillo intended his
theater to have. It is clear however, that it is quite
distant in form from the other arts of memory we've looked
at. In fact, the theater as planned really had very
little to do with memory-- it was more like a glorified
filing cabinet.

We have already looked at the connection between the memory systems of
the ancient world, and the emerging culture of literacy,
books and encyclopedic knowledge. The link between the
memory systems and the desire to give order to knowledge
is strong in this period. Camillo's memory theatre might
best be imagined as a link between memory and the
encyclopedia. It is an encyclopedia, however, filled with
bizarre pages.

Camillo's theatre was destroyed, if it ever existed, and we are left
only with a book, published posthumously, containing his
various plans and ideas. Yates reconstructs a version of
his theatre from this book.

Renaissance Hermeticism and the Role of
Magic

The strain of philosophy (or is it
science?) known as "hermeticism" rests on an unfortunate
error. In the late 15th century, just as the printing
press is starting to roll, Marsilio Ficino is asked by
Cosimo de Medici to translate some ancient texts that
Medici has acquired. Ficino is a scholar of ancient
greek, a humanist, and one of the main believers in
Platonic philosophy as a route to good clean living in the
Renaissance. Nonetheless, before translating Plato,
Ficino decides to translate work that he believes to be
the writings of the ancient (pre-Platonic) scholar Hermes
Trismegistus (he wasn't alone in his belief, but took
Augustine as an authority on the matter). Two texts,
Corpus Hermeticum and Asclepius form the
basic works. They cover learning, philosophy,
mathematics, medicine, alchemy and magic. They make a big
splash in the Renaissance, since it is a time of
rediscovery of ancient knowledge. Ficino and others
assumed this was the most ancient of scholarship-- ancient
Egyptian mysteries. The unfortunate error was that they
were not ancient texts: old, but not ancient. In 1614, a
philologist, Isaac Causabon, demonstrates that the texts
belong to a 2nd century A.D. collection, perhaps a
collection of various authors, but definitely not
pre-Platonic, and certainly not ancient Egyption.

Nonetheless, the works were incredibly
influential and widely read. In fact, Francis Yates
previous work Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic
Tradition suggests that there is an important, and
misunderstood connection between the scientific
revolution, and the Hermetic tradition.

The works contain
a bizarre version of a creation story. It is perhaps the
first truly multicultural text, combining ideas, words,
images and learning from hellenistic, roman, Christian,
Egyptian, Persian, and perhaps other sources as well. The
mixture of traditional ideas was profound enough that it
created an alternative to both mainstream Catholicism and
to Medieval Aristotleianism in the Renaissance.

Yates describes some of the aspects of this
magical-spiritual theory (151-59).